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Tuesday, April 17, 2012

How to use Pre-build and Post-build Events in Visual Studio?

Many of you might aware about Build Events feature of Visual
Studio. In this post i will explain little bit about Pre-build and Post-build events and their usage.

Sometimes you might need to execute some additional tasks
just before and after building your Visual Studio solution. So for this Visual Studio
provides nice way to do that using Build Events. You can specify commands inside
pre-build and post-build command line. You can find build events tab inside project
properties.

As mentioned in above image, you can specify almost all DOS commands inside pre-build and post-build event as per your requirement. Post-build event
gives you more control over Pre-build command line execution. You can decide when
to execute post-build event from given three options displayed in above image.

Let’s try to understand with simple example.

On successful build I want to copy my executable to some
specific folder on my local drive. So in above example I have used xcopy
command to copy files from one directory to another. In above example I have
used ‘$(ProjectDir)’ macro which will gives me the current project directory. There
are more macros available to use for various purposes see below image. These macros can be used to
specify location of project or solution, project name, extension, output
directory, configuration name etc.

You can use this feature in many scenarios like processing or executing batch file, copy assemblies to specific location, generate resources file using tool like resgen.exe etc. This isreally nice and useful feature provided by visual studio.

Hope you liked this small tip. Please leave your feedback in comments section.